Another man known to the word trade died in 1999. (We don’t use euphemisms like “passed away” or “departed this vale of tears”; when you die in this business, you die.) He never tried to pass himself off as a serious linguist or lexicographer, but his wordplay delighted his readers, stimulated interest in the world of words and sometimes instructed us with a light-verse touch.
The advertising and promotion man Willard Espy is best known for his almanacs of Words at Play, compiled and reissued by Merriam-Webster six months ago. Having fun with words can involve creative rhymes (“I do not roister with an oyster”) and nonce coinages (“my family was a scribacious lot”). As players of Scrabble and workers of crossword puzzles know, games are a good way to discover the glories of lexicography.
My favorite Espy production is “To My Greek Mistress,” an odd ode. “All you need to read off this verse as if it were English,” he noted, “is a vague recollection of the Greek alphabet.” (Begin by remembering that is pronounced “psi,” and is pronounced “rho.”)
With many a ate a
That you had baked, my dear;
This torpor N I you—
I’m feeling very queer.
O O upon your !—
You cruel blow!
Your dreadful has made me X;
My tears fall in a ;
I would havenother lass
Who baked that , I vow;
But still I M and M for you,
As sick as any cow.
Translation for those stimulated to brush up their Greek:
With many a (sigh) I ate a (pie)
That you had baked, my dear;
This torpor (new) (I owe to) you—
I’m feeling very queer.
O (fie) O (fie) upon your (pie)!—
You (dealt a) cruel blow!
Your dreadful (pie) has made me (cry);
My tears fall in a (row).
I would have (lammed a)nother lass
Who baked that (pie), I vow;
But still I (moo) and (moo) for you,
As sick as any cow.
Oops! The term aus gebrant is literally non-existent. The correct spelling of the verb ausbrennen in the perfect tense is ausgebrannt. Interestingly, in my native Danish, the term for burnout is the very close udbraendt. It is only speculation on my part whether Danes can thank Herbert Freudenberger for a common verb’s expanded figurative meaning.
Lotte Martin
Vero Beach, Florida
Words at War. “You are about to embark upon a great crusade,” General Eisenhower told his troops on the eve of D-Day; he later titled his memoirs Crusade in Europe. American presidents liked that word: Thomas Jefferson launched “a crusade against ignorance,” Theodore Roosevelt exhorted compatriots to “spend and be spent in an endless crusade” and FDR, calling for a “new deal” in his acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic convention, issued “a call to arms,” a “crusade to restore America to its own people.”
But when George W. Bush ad-libbed that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while,” his figure of speech was widely criticized.
That’s because the word has a religious root, meaning “taking the cross,” and was coined in the 11th century to describe the first military expedition of the Crusaders, European Christians sent to recover the Holy Land from the followers of Muhammad. The rallying-cry noun is offensive to many Muslims: three years ago, Osama bin Laden maligned U.S. forces in the Middle East as “crusader armies spreading like locusts.”
In this case, a word that has traditionally been used to rally Americans was mistakenly used in the context of opposing a radical Muslim faction, and the White House spokesman promptly apologized. In the same way, Vice President Dick Cheney was chided for referring admiringly to Pakistanis as “Paks.” Steven Weisman of the New York Times asked, “Is it conceivable that he would have used a similar slur with the Japanese?” The shortening Paki is taken to be a slur, even when criticized as “Paki -bashing,” and Paks only slightly less so. In past military cooperation with Pakistan, U.S. servicemembers used Paks as they would use Brits or Aussies, nationality nicknames no more offensive than Yanks. Cheney probably picked up Paks in his Pentagon days, but innocent intent is an excuse only once; now he is sensitized, as are we all.
In the same way, when the proposed Pentagon label for the antiterror campaign was floated out as “Operation Infinite Justice,” a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations noted that such eternal retribution was “the prerogative of God.” Informed of this, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quickly pulled the plug on the pretentious moniker.
Who coins these terms? Nobody will step forward; instead, software called “Code Word, Nickname and Exercise Term System” is employed to avoid responsibility; it spits out a list of random names from which commanders can choose. This avoidance of coinage responsibility leads to national embarrassment (which is finite justice). “Operations,” said Winston Churchill, “ought not to be described by code words which imply a boastful and overconfident sentiment.”
Apropos of Churchill: in Bush’s well-received address to the joint session of Congress calling for a “war on terror,” the president said with impressive intensity, “We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.” This evocation of an earlier rhetoric of resolution (which his aides, who turned out the speech in nine hours, insist was not researched) could not have been lost on Prime Minister Tony Blair, an honored guest in the audience. In a speech broadcast to America on Feb. 9, 1941, Churchill said: “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire…. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” (Note where the Brit placed the shalls to heighten the expression of resolve, and the will expressing futurity before the stressed finish. Bush held to the more American will not, in front of the emphasized tire, falter and fail.)
The Bush speech showed a heightened concern for connotation. In an exegesis of his prepared speech, this former speechwriter looked for the words not chosen. For example, Bush castigated the power-seeking terrorists as those who “follow in the path of Fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.” The word left out of the series beginning with Fascism and Nazism is, of course, Communism; however, the administration is seeking help from Russia and other former Soviet republics, in which many former and present Communists live—hence, the less specific, all-encompassing totalitarianism. The tactful substitution preceded the most original phrase in the speech, pointing to the end of the path of all those isms: “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”
The other noun that was not there in the Bush address to Congress was defense, as in the hottest phrase in Washington today, homeland defense.
The earliest citation I can find is by China’s Xinhua News Agency, reporting on April 11, 1977, about “the mobilization of the puppet army and the ‘homeland defense reserve forces’” by South Korea. Twenty years later, a panel of experts recommended to Defense Secretary William Cohen that a new armed-forces mission considering biological threats be called Defense of the Homeland.
In February 2001, a commission headed by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman delivered a prescient report that the nation was vulnerable to terrorist attack. It called for a cabinet-level agency amalgamating customs, law enforcement, Coast Guard and other nonmilitary federal agencies coordinating homeland defense. The Hart-Rudman report received little attention in the media or at the White House.
On the eve of the president’s speech, White House sources told the Associated Press he would create a “Homeland Defense Security Office”—a coordination group, not a whole new department. At the last minute, the word defense was dropped. Why? I’m told because it “sounded defensive,” and, more probably, “protecting the internal security of the homeland would be confused with the war-making mission of the Department of Defense.”
Thus, in the new lexicon of the war on terror, security means “defense”; defense means “attack.”
You stated cru
sade and crusader were coined in the 11th century. They were not. Those who took the cross in the First Crusade (as well as the second) were called “pilgrims”; their bloody journey to Jerusalem being a “pilgrimage.”
It was not until about the time of the preaching of the Third (1188) that the venture became a “crusade” (croseria) and the adventurers “crusaders” (crucesignati). Just as our doughboys who fought in 1918 could not know what they were involved in, neither could Europe’s knighthood know in 1095.
Ronald Colvin
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
I think you messed up your “shall” and “will” definitions. Surely Churchill was just expressing simple futurity with, “We shall not fail … shall not weaken….” It was a given. His resolve and determination were expressed with “… we [bloody well] will finish the job.” With the tools, nothing can (shall) stop us.
I was taught that first-person “will” and second- and third-person “shall” signified determination. Simple futurity was first-person “shall” and second-and third-person “will.” And if you don’t believe me, see p. 58 of Strunk and White [The Elements of Style].
Graeme McLean
New York, New York
My English teacher at Grafton Street Junior High School,Worcester, Massachusetts, was a superb grammarian and affectionately called “Bulldog” Brogan, because of his large, fierce teeth and facial expressions. One of the grammatical distinctions that he taught his classes has been invaluable to me as an attorney in being able to construe the meaning of statutes and in drafting documents. According to him, for the ordinary future tense, “shall” is used for the first persons singular and plural and “will” is used for the second and third persons singular and plural. However, to express obligation or determination these auxiliary verbs are reversed.
It is true that in contemporary oral and even written American usage, “shall” is not used to express future tense, even for the first-person singular. However, I have noticed in recently reading Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth that Ms. Wharton is very careful to follow Mr. Brogan’s prescriptions.
You are wrong in your analysis of the quotations of Bush and Churchill. As I will show, both speeches observe the distinction that I have specified in ¶1 above. First of all, when Churchill states, “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire,” he is expressing an optimistic prediction about how the English will behave. He is using the straightforward future tense. But notice how in the final sentence you quote, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job,” Churchill uses “will” with the first-person plural to express the determination and resolve of the English people. Now Churchill is dedicating the English nation “to finishing the job.”
On the contrary, Bush’s speechwriters wisely have short-circuited the Churchillian language, in consideration of the speaker and his American audience and the sixty years that have elapsed since the time Churchill delivered his speech. Still, there is in President Bush’s speech the powerful, though simplified, echo of Churchill in “We will not tire, we will not falter, we will not fail.” Here, Bush speaks with confidence of the resolve of the nation. He proclaims the “will” of the people to do what is necessary. These three four-word sentences serve as a litany for the American people, instead of the more leisurely alternatives used by Churchill (“fail or falter” and “weaken or tire”). Bush utters a battle cry. There is a crescendo in the use of the short, Anglo-Saxon verbs that resonates with the alliteration and assonance of the final “falter” and “fail,” which is a brilliant reversal of the sequence of the use of these two words by Churchill.
Donald V. Morano
Chicago, Illinois
Y
Yee-Haw. When Paul Beier, a mountain lion expert at Northern Arizona University, was told that 11,000 biodiverse acres of Irvine Ranch in Southern California were set aside by conservationists, he exclaimed to the Los Angeles Times: “Yee-haw! That is fantastic news.”
When the actor-director Jodie Foster recently won a celebrity’s game on Jeopardy, she, too, let out a yee-haw, as did Oprah Winfrey when interviewing lucky survivors of near-death experiences.
And when the Dow Jones industrial average poked its head above 10,000 late last year, the Cincinnati Post quoted a happy Wall Street watcher saying, “You can quote me this way, ‘Yee-haw,’ with a hyphen in the middle.”
A hyphen does indeed belong between the yee and the haw of this joyous expression. What does the exclamation mean? The New Oxford American Dictionary is the first to include it: “An expression of enthusiasm or exuberance, typically associated with cowboys or rural inhabitants of the southern U.S.”
The haw is often pronounced ha. The Leicester Mercury of Britain headlines an article about “the 10 worst country-and-western song titles ever recorded” as “Yee-ha Howlers.” (The odious “Did I Shave My Legs for This?” was runner-up to the poignant farewell ditty “Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth ’Cause I’m Kissing You Goodbye.”)
What happened to the old western favorites Yippee! and Yahoo!? They’re buried at the O.K. Corral.
The earliest citation of Yippie! is supplied by Merriam-Webster, from an Everybody’s magazine of 1914: “Yip-pee, Andreas! I’ve done it!” Popularized by the novelist Sinclair Lewis in his 1920 Main Street, it is generally believed to have a much earlier origin in cowboy usage, though I cannot find any examples. In the 1960s, the yippies, based on an acronym of the Youth International Party influenced by the laid-back hippies, drained much of the cowboy flavor out of the word.
Yahoo has a literary origin. The satirist Jonathan Swift, in his 1726 Gulliver’s Travels, gave that name to a race of brutal men subservient to highly intelligent horses, the onomatopoeic Houyhnhnm. It was taken up by political writers in the last century and applied to anti-intellectuals, usually right-wingers.
Meanwhile, out west, riders of the purple sage used the word in the farrago of interjections and exclamations beginning with y: yippy-aye-ay, yowee, yea, yo. There may be an association with yell.
In the 1990s, yahoo! was taken over by the Internet service provider of that name. Its Web site explains that the company’s founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang, drolly designated their server “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”—its initials spelled yahoo—but they liked the acronym’s Swiftian meaning of “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.” Though the company preserved the exclamation mark in its title, evoking not the brutes in Swift’s allegory but the yell of a man astride a bucking horse, yahoo’s identification with the popular site has overtaken its sense as a cry of a man in the saddle.
With the synonymic underbrush thus cleared, we can now address the origin of yee-haw!
A clue can be found in a 1911 short story by Jack London, describing a rider on the ice drawn by sled dogs: “As they were driving in single file, without reins, he had to guide them by his voice, and it was evident the head-dog had never learned the meaning of gee and haw.”
As equestrians know, gee (with a soft g) is usually a direction to a horse to go to the right, and haw to the left. To gee up and gaddy-up is to urge onward. “The regiment is somehow got back,” wrote Thomas Lackland in Homespun; or, Five-and-Twenty Years Ago, an 1867 novel, “by geeing and hawing … while he ‘gees’ and ‘haws’ the yoke of cattle.”
My speculation that the current yee-haw is bottomed on the horseman’s gee-haw is supported by a 1967 citation from a Texan in the files of the Dictionary of American Regional English. “That suggests to me,” says Leonard Zwilling of DARE, “that yee-haw might have something to do with the commands for a horse—to gee, go right, and haw, go left. On the other hand, it might have something to do with gee-haw whimmey-diddle, a toy found in the Appalachians.”
For those who wish to do further philological research in the field, the World Gee Haw Whimmey Diddle competition is held annually at the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville, North Carolina. The spinning toy, which can go left or right, is also known as the ziggerboo
and the flipperdinger. As the first prize is announced, listen to what the winner yells.
Z
Zemblanity. Arms controllers know that the Russians have been setting off non-nuclear explosions at their nuclear test facility on the barren, frigid Arctic island of Nova Zembla, and thereby hangs a new word.
An old word is serendipity, “a happy discovery by accident.” It was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, based on the fairy tale of the three princes of Serendip, who “were always making discoveries … of things they were not in quest of.” The Indian Ocean island of Serendip, later known as Ceylon, is now the nation of Sri Lanka.
A Times Book Review note about the novel Armadillo, by William Boyd, reads, “The novel’s hero … is undone by an outbreak of zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, in the multicultural hubbub of Cool Britannia.” Newton Scherl of Englewood, New Jersey, writes, “I have tried without success to find zemblanity in any of my dictionaries.” That’s because it is not yet there.
“What is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth?” asks Boyd in his novel. “Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound … Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.”
Writers from Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope to Jules Verne and Salman Rushdie have used Zembla’s wastes north of Siberia as symbolic of what Charlotte Brontë called “forlorn regions of dreary space.” Now this site of testing of non-nuclear explosives at a nuclear facility has given birth to zemblanity, the inexorable discovery of what we don’t want to know.
Zhlub. A recent New Yorker cartoon by David Sipress has an ordinary-looking woman addressing a wimpish man on the other end of a couch with “I want to start dating other zhlubs .”
The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time Page 43